Sabine

About this artwork

'Sabine' comes from a series of four paintings entitled 'Shift' that Watt showed in an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000. She was inspired by the sensuous nature of the fabric that features in Ingres's paintings of women. Watt found a way of representing the body using the shapes created in fabric, focusing on the suggestive power of material. In this monumental painting, the meticulously painted folds and creases of the fabric evoke the human figure and create a sense of rhythm and movement.

Alison Watt is one of the most distinctive and original painters active in Scotland today. This is one of a series of four paintings entitled Shift that she showed at an exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in 2000. Partly inspired by her fascination with the sumptuous fabrics in portraits by the nineteenth-century artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, her work combines the weight and lustre of older art with the suggestive power of modern abstraction. The folds and creases of a piece of fabric are translated on to a monumental scale, creating pictorial drama from the subtlest shifts of light and the implicit movement in billowing folds and shadowy clefts.

Watt was born in Greenock and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her early paintings were mainly portraits and figure paintings, meticulously observed and suffused with a pale luminosity. She often painted from models posing nude, either seated or reclining. Gradually, however, Watt became increasingly absorbed in the fabrics and draperies used as background props in the life-painting studio and was intrigued by the imprint left after her mod­els had finished posing; as she recalled, ‘something beautiful was created by their leaving’. Increasingly it was the absence of the figure, or rather its implied presence, that came to dominate her work. She made paintings that juxtaposed nudes with panels of painted fabric and then, in the 2000 exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, moved on to paintings of fabric alone.

The title refers to a portrait by Ingres of Madame Philibert (Sabine) Rivière, 1806 in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Watt’s interest in this French artist dates from a childhood visit with her father to the National Gallery in London when she was first introduced to Ingres’s famous portrait of Madame Moitessier, 1856. It was partly through her almost obsessive study of Ingres that Watt came to realise that ‘the paintings of fabric were more sensual than the paintings of the body’. Sabine was painted over a period of eight weeks in January and February 2000. The starting point was a piece of nineteenth-century fabric chosen for its particular heft and colour and carefully positioned to create a dynamic combination of folds and tucks. Although this is an impressive rendering of the texture and feel of a piece of material, Watt has stressed that she was attracted to the sensual and evocative potential of her subject: ‘In Sabine I wanted to convey the erotic; the pleasures of seeing and touching as well as the less tangible features of fabric such as scent and sound. Subjecting the material to an intense scrutiny, translating even the smallest details and yet displacing and altering what I saw created something more than just imitation.’ As is often the case in great art, it is what is implied rather than stated that is the most powerful. By editing out the human figure, we are aware of what is missing or concealed from us. Watt’s painting is restrained and meditative yet imbued with a compelling physicality and sensuous power.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.

Alison Watt

Alison Watt

Watt was born in Greenock and studied at Glasgow School of Art. She first came to prominence when, still a student, she won a national portrait competition organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Watt subsequently became known for her paintings of figures, often female nudes, in light-filled rooms.…